Interzone

New Science Fiction & Fantasy INTERZONE ISSUE 274 OUT NOW!

INTERZONE 259

3rd Jul, 2015

Cover:

Green Tea by 2015 cover artist Martin Hanford

Contents:

Fiction:

Silencer – Head Like a Hole Remix by E. Catherine Toblerillustrated by Ben Baldwin

Glasser is the hole in my head, Glasser is the hole in my heart, and Glasser is the strange stillness that settles on my shoulders and overcomes my hands. My hands should shake, they should sweat; they should not be able to bear the weight of this weapon, but they do. Without complaint.

The Deep of Winter by Chris Butlerillustrated by Martin Hanford

The six of us battled against the blizzard as we pushed onwards down the hill, every step a struggle. In the hollow at the centre of the field we cleared away the snow, which had already started to settle, and located the hatch. The mechanism standing proud of the hinged metal access plate turned surprisingly easily, which made me think it had been used recently. So perhaps my suspicions were true.

Rush Down, Roar Gently by Sara Saabillustrated by Richard Wagner

When Aya resolved to visit Zeina, it had been raining for one hundred and two days in Beirut.

The sky was a soggy hookah flint, a puree made of ash, and Aya did not think she would live to see another dry and sunny day. Nothing about her was ever dry those days, from her tired lungs, to the straggling white hairs of her eyebrows. Still, Aya would not let herself die without learning what had become of her friend. For that, she would haul her bent skeleton through a drowning city.

After His Kind by Richard W. Strachanillustrated by Richard Wagner

People were harder, he thought as they led him to the cave. Real people. But the others were long gone now, and not a name or a face came back to him when he called. The worms though, the planarians . . . he remembered the worms. The idea of them was so simple there was little to forget.

Edited by Rich Larson

For some reason I thought Wyatt would look different after getting Edited, but when he steps out onto the porch of his parents’ reefhouse summer rental, swilling a Corona and swiping my we’re here skype off his tab, he’s the same as ever. Still tall and bony with gray eyes and pale blonde hair that looks like it’ll stick to your hand but doesn’t.

His first mistake, thought Bunchess Taylor, was hiring the white boy. There had been a time when Bunchess would have taken issue with anyone who presumed to contribute a note to one of his sets. But now he was resident producer at Midnight Funk Association, dropping sets Tuesday through Thursday, and the job had become a little repetitive. So he outsourced the creation of new sounds to the white boy and spent the rest of his time pumping iron and drinking. The only drawback was that he had to spend time in the white boy’s condo, which was packed with all the high-end audio equipment Bunchess had ever wanted but could never afford.

Black Static 47 Out Now:

Issue 47 of Black Static, Interzone's darker half, is out now. New stories by John Connolly, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, James Van Pelt, Ray Cluley, Kate Jonez, Eric J. Guignard. Black Static is published in the same format and at the same time as Interzone. To take out a discounted subscription to both magazines please visit this website's shop.

Interface:

Love Your Local SceneJonathan McCalmont

Ask me what I mean by the word ‘scene’ and I will tell you of the night that they closed La Dolce Vita. Never more than a small nightclub in the Swiss city of Lausanne, La Dolce Vita opened its doors in 1985 and rapidly established itself as one of the most respected rock venues in French-speaking Switzerland. In the fourteen years it took for La Dolce Vita to burn through its reserves of credit and municipal good will, the club’s operators had lured dozens of fantastic bands to their tiny stage and encouraged the formation of dozens more. The night they closed La Dolce Vita, a load of local bands took to the stage to pay tribute and you could not only see the bonds that existed between the different acts but also hear the waves of influence that had rippled out from the few bands that had managed to find some measure of commercial success. The night they closed La Dolce Vita, I saw the Lausanne scene and I heard the Lausanne sound.

Future InterruptedJonathan McCalmont

All That Science Fiction Allows

People used to say that self-pub­lishing was going to revolutionise genre fiction. They said that genre imprints were out of touch and overly cautious. They spoke of creative bottlenecks and how authors were going to unlock the raw potential of genre by moving beyond the bean-counters and gate-keepers of traditional publishing. They said a lot about how self-publishing was going to change the world but the reality turned out to be a billion shades of grey and the occasional flash of colour such as that provided by Ian Sales’ magnificent and ground-breaking Apollo Quartet.

Time PiecesNina Allan

Pigs Might Fly

“I want to portray struggle. Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, then you probably wrote a pretty boring book.” (George R.R. Martin for Entertainment Weekly, June 3rd 2015.)

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, together with its TV adaptation under the title of the first book in the sequence, Game of Thrones, is possibly the most popular fantasy series of our time. Game of Thrones has been regularly praised for its knotty political intrigue, its refusal to compromise in its portrayal of gritty, not to say grim, realism, and its conflicted, morally ambiguous characters. It is just as regularly disparaged for its heavy reliance on serial assassination and random bloodletting as its main plot driver, its privileging of ‘events’ over genuine character development and in particular its treatment of women and the sexual violence enacted upon them. Not occasionally but every week, as a kind of spectator sport.

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Coming Soon:

Jeff Noon makes his Intertzone debut in issue #260 (out in September) with the extraordinary 'No Rez', illustrated by Dave Senecal, and John Shirley returns with 'Weedkiller'.